In an Instagram post over the weekend, Musk also revealed that the car would carry a dummy driver, which Musk is calling “Starman,” wearing a SpaceX space suit.

“Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring,” Musk said in an Instagram post in December, adding that the company “decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel.”

However, all rocket payloads need a permit from the Federal Aviation Administration to launch, and Musk’s sleek electric car is no exception. The FAA granted SpaceX that permission on Friday in a staunchly formal notice, which Keith Cowing posted on NASA Watch.

The FAA permit mentions a “hyperbolic orbit,” the eccentric path Musk hopes his car takes through space. Also known as a Hohmann transfer orbit, it would send the car out to Mars orbit and back toward the sun on a nearly infinite loop.

“The payload will be … playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit,” Musk said in December.

While Musk has said the car is “one of the silliest things” he ever imagined launching, its 2-ton mass and ambitious orbit is no joke, as Eric Berger points out in a recent story for Ars Technica.

The Hohmann transfer orbit “is critical to understanding how Musk plans to sell the rocket and what its flight, after all these years of waiting, means for the aerospace industry,” Berger wrote.

If Falcon Heavy doesn’t blow up, immortalizing Musk’s on- and off-Earth legacies, SpaceX will move forward with launches for paying customers, including the US military, perhaps later this year, the company says.

More people would be likely to line up to place payloads atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. While it costs about $US90 million per launch, that’s roughly a third of the cost of any similarly powerful rocket built by SpaceX’s competitors. Part of what makes that price possible is that the booster cores – each of which each has nine Merlin engines and stands about 134 feet tall – are fully reusable.

With enough fuel and the right trajectory, Falcon Heavy has enough thrust to launch a payload heavier than a car to Pluto, let alone Mars. That would appeal to NASA, which is gearing up to launch several planet- and moon-bound spacecraft in the coming years. The space agency is also in an ever-present budget pinch – and behind schedule in building its super-heavy-lift rocket, called Space Launch System.